the madness of crowds

That Neeson’s expression of regret for his past thoughts counts for nothing in the eyes of the new morality police is striking, and worrying. It points to a streak of very anti-human fatalism in the Twittermobbing phenomenon. The new witch-hunters are not in the business of forgiving people — even people who confess to their one-time horribleness — because they fundamentally believe that people cannot change. That if you once had a racist thought you will always be racist. That if you made a homophobic joke ten years ago, you will be a homophobe forever. This is why they engage in the low pursuit of ‘offense archaeology’, as the journalist Freddie de Boer described the trend for poring over public figures’ every past statement and deed in search of something nasty or embarrassing that might be used against said public figure today — because they think people do not change, that their wickedness is ingrained, that they suffer from original sin and it cannot be washed away.

Intellectuals will always, always overvalue the need for theory, but again, there’s no need to ferret out philosophical convictions which likely don’t even exist. The “new witch-hunters” don’t have a robust theory of human nature underlying their actions; they’re motivated by the same base incentives and cynical calculations as ever. Liam Neeson is more valuable to them as a target of their insatiable spite than he is as a political ally. Or, to put it another way, all he is to the Twittermob is an entertainer. The entertainment might entail watching him star in a movie, or it might entail trying to destroy his reputation and career just because they can. Social media is the insane, decadent emperor, and we’re all gladiators competing for its amusement. Apparently Neeson’s latest performance has gotten the thumbs-down. So it goes.

We’re living in an age of social norms being in flux. Many would say t’was ever thus, but I’m specifically talking about the sort of flux facilitated by the rapid expansion of personal technology. Let’s recall that smartphones and social media have only been ubiquitous for ten years, if even that long. The effects, however, have clearly been profound and widespread. For our narrow focus here — namely, the birth of a vanguard of Javerts who specialize in public shaming and mob behavior — it’s enough to note the leveling effect whereby a resentful nobody with too much spare time can now easily attack and humiliate a celebrity. Imagine what a rush it must be to see someone famous or powerful having to grovel and apologize because of something you found and publicized from their social media history. Imagine what a heady feeling it would be to be part of a news story, mentioned in the same sentence with your formerly-exalted victim. If Nietzsche were here, he would instantly recognize it for what it is — a flexing of muscles, a testing of strength, an indulgence of all sorts of normally-forbidden urges as people, free from the old norms and hierarchies, recognize a newly-opened path to status and influence and set about exploring the boundaries. New norms are still evolving, but it will be a while before there are any widely-accepted rules about how to behave on this electronic frontier. It’s a tale of two Williams — Golding was much more percipient than Godwin about what is likely to happen in the anarchic interlude between the decay of old mores and the birth of new ones.

Still, not all of the mob behavior is attributable to a new breed of resentful revolutionaries practicing the same old cutthroat political maneuvering. There’s also a different primal reaction that plays a significant role. Some of the critiques of social-justice fanaticism talk about the concept of moral pollution. The reaction to Neeson’s story of attempted vigilante vengeance was visceral, not philosophical. The absolute refusal to countenance any ambiguity resembles a moral germophobia, a reflexive desire to avoid contamination. The easiest way to stay safe is to culturally quarantine all the bad people with their bad thoughts so they can’t infect the rest of us. It would be useless to explain that you can’t catch racism by sympathizing with a man telling a story of being enraged beyond reason by the rape of his friend. They’re too busy frantically washing their hands for the hundredth time today to entertain any nuance.

Perhaps next time in amateur sociology hour, we’ll consider whether the dramatic increase in diagnoses of Asperger’s and autism has any correlation with this widespread social maladaptation and inability to process ambiguity. Also, Marie Kondo: symbol of the zeitgeist? Maybe the trend of denouncing and renouncing the Four Olds (or the Four Unwokes?) is just a political form of decluttering.

There are a lot of different views on climate change on the right. (I myself am mostly in the Matt Ridley “lukewarmer” camp.) But he ignores all of the competing views in favor of an argument that amounts to little more than fan service for liberal readers. One can believe that climate change is a real concern, with some legitimate science on its side, while also believing there is a range of available policy options that do not conform to the liberal party line and declining to act in a spirit of righteous panic. (Noah Rothman notes how the enlightened position on climate change must always be even more “hysteria.”)

I have dogmatic family members who typically take the talk-radio party line on the political issue du jour. You know the type — they greet every snow flurry with triumphant cackling and a hearty chorus of SCREW YOU AL GORE. It’s probably fair to call them “deniers,” since their positions are usually reflexively determined by whatever they perceive to be the official stance of liberal elites. But the Lady of the House has a cousin, a geologist, who visited us at the beginning of the month. While we were hiking, she succinctly summarized her view on climate change: “Is it happening? Yes. Is human activity contributing to it? Most likely. Is there anything we can realistically do about it? Probably not.” She’s not actually a conservative, but among the conservatives I read and talk to, I find that to be a fairly typical view. One of them had a useful rule of thumb for weeding out the cranks — if they’re opposed to fossil fuels but refuse to even countenance the idea of nuclear power, they’re not serious enough to bother with. It may well be that I’m just inclined to hear what I want to hear, but I find the stoic pragmatism and lack of hysteria refreshing. As Auden said, we are changed by what we change. We’ll adapt, or we won’t, but when has that ever not been the case?

The received left-wing wisdom, by contrast — well, it’s usually facile to compare various beliefs and behaviors to religion, but in the case of climate change, I’m not sure what else to call it. As I mentioned before, I check in with The Week as part of my daily bookmark routine, to keep tabs on what the somewhat-sane left is talking about, and I’ve been amused to see the resident fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist Ryan Cooper pounding the pulpit recently. “Climate change is going to fry your state,” he thundered toward a heretical Utah senator. “Wealth cannot save you from climate change,” he warned us in the prior week’s sermon. Sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia, indeed. But for the clearest, most painstaking demonstration of how so much green activism is nothing but a surrogate outlet for moral evangelism, you can’t do better than read Peter Dorman’s steamrolling of Naomi Klein’s recent spasm of righteousness posing as a book, This Changes Everything. If this were a boxing match, it would have been stopped after the first few paragraphs.

I don’t have any strong views on climate change, but what I find most interesting and amusing is the idea that I should, like it’s a dereliction of my duty as a citizen to avoid pronouncing on events that I can’t influence. I couldn’t be more ordinary and anonymous. What practical use could I possibly make of a doctrinaire opinion? Too many people seem convinced that a diploma and an advantageous upbringing qualify them to serve as volunteer policymakers and amateur heads of state. I think I’d like it better if they devoted that time and energy to church activities.

I wouldn’t have thought anything would be more pathetic than seeing balaclava-wearing middle-class anarchists doing their best to embody the mocking image Mike Doughty painted of them almost two decades ago in his song about the 1999 Seattle WTO riots, “Busting Up a Starbucks.” It’s hard to outdo a bunch of imbeciles fighting “fascism” by, uh, disrupting peaceful assemblies, smashing store windows and beating people in the streets with metal poles. But legacy media desperately attempting to stay relevant by cheering them on is even worse. Yes, Milo sure did get “schooled” by having his book rocket straight to the number one spot on Amazon’s besteller list and getting even more invites to appear on TV programs. Honestly, if this weren’t just part of a long, long tradition of the utterly useless, self-defeating stupidity of left-wingers, I’d suspect Milo organized the whole thing as a brilliant marketing strategy. As it is, they were like this long before he was even born, and will continue like this into the foreseeable future, never learning a thing.

You’ve heard me say it before, and no doubt I will have to say it many more times: there’s no neutral ground in a holy war.

Lord knows that humans need no special incentive to indulge in tribalism. Protecting the in-group and attacking the out-group is one of the most deeply-engrained instincts in the species of chimpanzee that made good. As numerousexperiments have shown, even the most trivial and nonsensical distinctions can turn formerly peaceable people into bloodthirsty enemies.

It’s easy enough to shrug off these latest exercises in public shaming and forced political awareness on the assumption that of course pop music superstars and Fortune 500 companies will attract this kind of unhinged, obsessive attention. But rest assured that the only thing preventing these righteous crusaders from reintroducing a modern version of impressment for the culture wars is the problem of logistics, not the lack of desire. They would gladly conscript nobodies like you or I as well if they could.

Again, it’s incredibly easy for any human to reduce a complex issue to a Manichean battle between the saved and the damned. But this particular type of totalitarian impulse, to completely obliterate the idea that anything could be allowed to escape the gravitational pull of partisan politics, is especially appealing to left-wingers. It is axiomatic for conservative philosophy that there will always be a certain amount of imperfection and injustice in the world, and a sane response to this fact entails that people have to allow some sort of cultural or personal space to forget about crusading. At five o’clock, the whistle blows, and we set the bare-knuckle political brawling aside until the next day, like Sam and Ralph. There are more important things to concern ourselves with, better sources of solace like family and art to occupy ourselves with, and the fight will never be conclusively won anyway.

But to the progressive equivalent of theocracy, the idea of a “secular” space, free from political considerations, is heretical. Unsupervised free spaces like that are a breeding ground for subversive, reactionary ideas. For a political philosophy that accepts no inherent limits on mankind’s ability to perfect itself, the very existence of imperfection and injustice is an affront to its deepest identity. The grinding years of imperfect life cannot be forgiven. If something inherent in the world makes it incapable of being custom-fit to the Procrustean beds of reformers and revolutionaries, and provides no satisfying outlet for their utopian energies, they will eventually tire of vainly flinging themselves against the bars of their cage and start releasing their frustration on others unfortunate enough to be within reach. This is what we see here — in a world which, to them, seems to have gone completely insane, in opposition to all their wishes, they are reduced to lashing out against people guilty of standing by too innocently. In their desire to perfect the world through politics, they would destroy the oases of individual privacy and freedom that make this imperfect world bearable at all.

BuzzFeed decides to publish a casual smear of some celebrity couple, no doubt in hopes of costing them their TV show, or perhaps simply because it was more entertaining than churning out yet another listicle. Not to be outdone in the stupidity competition, Breitbart demands a boycott of Kellogg’s in response to the politically-motivated withdrawal of advertising. I have been hoping for years to see these culture-war border skirmishes and vindictive economic embargoes explode into all-out Götterdämmerung. I’m fairly sure it meets the standard of “just war” when both sides richly deserve as much suffering and destruction as they can possibly inflict on each other. By all means, keep up the relentless politicization of absolutely everything. Keep trying to create economic circles of moral purity, micro forms of crony capitalism, in which your money never passes into the hands of anyone who hasn’t passed a stringent ideological background check. When you’ve finally taken your petty point-scoring and scalp-taking to its logical conclusion, and you realize that you don’t like the sort of society you’ve created, perhaps then you might finally think about growing up.

Alice More: Arrest him!Sir Thomas More: Why, what has he done?Margaret More: He’s bad!More: There is no law against that.Will Roper: There is! God’s law!More: Then God can arrest him.Alice: While you talk, he’s gone!More: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast– man’s laws, not God’s– and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.

But the horrible irony is that PC is actually a horribly ineffective weapon against the devil of intolerance. Real bigots, like real rapists who we are told should be taught “not to rape,” care nothing whatsoever for shaming or moral chastising. To the contrary, they take pride in being monsters. To call them bigots or racists or what-have-you is for them a badge of honor.

No, as Professor Tom Nichols pointed out in his excellent article on PC and Donald Trump, what PC did was something else: utterly destroy the political center. Once upon a time, you could hold a middle ground, nuanced position on any given issue in public discourse. Now? You’re either all the way one way or all the way another way.

In going after the devil, PC has slain the good men, the knights who could fight the danger, or at least check or weaken it. It searched for enemies where none existed only to release the ones that did. It reminds me, sadly, of Europe of the 1930s, when democracy and any hint of moderation was so thoroughly discredited and weakened in the name of instant solutions and hatred of “the system” that everyone ultimately had no choice but to pick which side was less awful: Stalin or Hitler.

Radical Islamist terrorists certainly exist. We all know that. But fifteen or so years ago, to many of us on the political left, center, or even moderate right, it seemed at times that the threat of Islamic terrorism was a rhetorical trope more than a geopolitical reality. The Bush administration used the shock of 9/11 in service to an incredibly radical agenda, cynically conflating honest critics of particular policies with reflexive anti-American radicals, smearing the patriotism of people who had supported them in Afghanistan, but balked at invading Iraq. You’re either with us, or you hate America and you want the terrorists to win. We all know this by now as well.

Likewise, racists, sexists and rapists certainly exist. However, this generation of freshly-hatched university students, their heads filled with academic grievance-mongering and their hearts yearning for a grand, significant civil rights battle of their very own, started training analytical floodlights on language, video games and other harmless phenomena in order to make shadows appear larger and more threatening. The undeniable progress that society has made over recent decades regarding race and gender issues wasn’t good enough; in fact, it only added to the crusaders’ frustration. If devils couldn’t be easily found, they’d have to be invented. As should have been expected, the people who bore the brunt of their fanatical fury weren’t the proudly racist or the crudely sexist, but the mostly-liberal people who, up to the point of their own show trials, had thought themselves part of the fight against those reactionary ills. You’re either with us, or you’re with the misogynists. And the line defining who was a misogynist kept creeping closer. If you protested, you became a rape apologist.

The moderate Democrats circa 2003 thought that by giving the administration the benefit of the doubt, and by rhetorically distancing themselves from anyone to their left, they might be respected as loyal opposition. Likewise, many progressives made excuses for the social justice warriors, rationalizing that “at least they’re not Republicans”. They urged critics to soften their oppositional stance and inevitably smeared the character of anyone who refused. Honestly, though, I expect nothing less than fanaticism from those who would hunt devils, which is why I reserve the bulk of my contempt for the foolish cowards who make excuses for them in hopes of saving their own skins.

The answer to this superficially appealing logic: Yes, electing Trump would amount to a dire peril for American democracy. But not only is violence unlikely to prevent his election as a practical matter (it makes Trump a figure of sympathy, and at any rate, his supporters are far more heavily armed). It would also be a disaster as a moral matter. Suppose that Trump’s election could be prevented by breaking up his speeches and intimidating his supporters. Such a “victory” would actually constitute the blow to democracy it purports to stop, eroding the long-standing norm that elections should be settled at the ballot box rather than through street fighting.

To be sure, the advocates of violence against Trump would disagree with this conclusion. And that disagreement lies at the heart of a deeper ideological fissure that has opened up on the left over the last couple of years. Liberalism sees political rights as a positive good — rights for one are rights for all. “Democracy” means political rights for every citizen. The far left defines democracy as the triumph of the subordinate class over the privileged class. Political rights only matter insofar as they are exercised by the oppressed. The oppressor has no rights.

Related: Everyone Wants to Kill Baby Hitler. I particularly enjoy the irony that the left has now found its own version of the “ticking time bomb” scenario to justify counterproductive tactics.

There is a word for ideologies, religious or secular, that seek to politicize and control every aspect of human life: totalitarian. Unlike most such ideologies, SocJus has no fixed doctrine or clear utopian vision. But in a way, its amorphousness makes it more tyrannical. While all revolutions are prone to devouring their children, the SocJus movement may be especially vulnerable to self-immolation: its creed of “intersectionality”—multiple overlapping oppressions—means that the oppressed are always one misstep away from becoming the oppressor. Your cool feminist T-shirt can become a racist atrocity in a mouse-click. And, since new “marginalized” identities can always emerge, no one can tell what currently acceptable words or ideas may be excommunicated tomorrow.

…The social justice movement has many well-meaning followers who want to make the world a better place. But most of its “activism” is little more than a self-centered quest for moral purity.

Irving Howe wrote a viral post identifying the key characteristics of the social justice movement. It was not based on a “politics of common action”, because that would require them to make common cause with “saints, sinners and ordinary folk”; rather, it was a “gesture of moral rectitude” designed to set them apart from this fallen world. But none of them actually believe in the possibility of Marxist-style revolution, Howe wrote, and combined with their unrealistic standards and demands, there’s nothing left for these would-be radicals to do but maintain “a distinct personal style”. Howe noted how strikingly often these fundamentalist preachers of privilege-checking were themselves the privileged offspring of the white middle-class, and fretted over their radical zeal to jettison everything valuable in their Western heritage in the process of striving for “a mode of personal differentiation” in which style becomes “the very substance of revolt”.

Now, alert readers, having clicked through the link already, will have noticed that I was funnin’ with them a bit. Irving Howe was actually an anti-Stalinist leftist critic, and his essay “New Styles in ‘Leftism'” was written in 1965. To go ahead and put a fine point on it, nothing significant has changed about these people in over fifty years. They’re still using the same counter-productive tactics that their parents (or even grandparents) were using, still trying to extract ore from the same exhausted vein of narcissistic identity politics. Envisioning themselves in the moral vanguard, they’re blind to the ways they’re bound by thoughtless tradition. Believing themselves too clever to learn from history, they’re oblivious to how their radicalism follows the cyclical whims of fashion. Desiring a world filled with culture wars of liberation, they find themselves within shrinking horizons, isolated and constrained by atavistic tribal enmity.

It feels a little frustrating that a site like Salon that I used to always go to for great news, great commentary, did turn into a caricature of what a lot of really dumb conservatives used to say it was. That’s really disturbing to me because I don’t want it to be. And I’ve been saying this over and over again.

I asked, “Is there any way to be critical of this “callout culture” without sounding like a whiny white male who is sad that he can’t tell racist jokes anymore?” And she told me, “No. So just go ahead and do it.” I’m sure some people will take it that way. And that is unfortunate, because I honestly think there is a balance that could be struck between making sure that closet racists, woman-haters, etc are made known and this kind of obsession with finding something Wrong with everyone. And yes, I think someone sifting through five years of tweets upon first hearing of a comedian is, if not legitimately obsessive, at least on the Obsession Spectrum.

We are addicted to the rush of being offended and we love tearing down our idols. Always have, always will. I’m not going to join the Patton Oswalt brigade of “Oh dear, You People are so sensitive that it’s silencing my white male voice!”

George Carlin famously joked about how everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, and everyone who drives faster than you is a maniac. As in so many instances, George was making us laugh while imparting a deep truth about human nature to us: We all picture ourselves occupying the sensible, moderate, middle ground; we all imagine ourselves to be the embodied avatar of clear-eyed common sense. Personally, I think this tendency is hardwired into our psychology. It comes standard with the narrative-maker we all use to make sense of the world. Everybody, no matter how nuts they are, thinks there are clowns to the left of them and jokers to the right.

Like the Bible says, then, as ye triangulate, so shall ye be triangulated against. Oswalt wants to take pains to differentiate himself from the “dumb conservatives” who were criticizing the excesses of progressive piety a long time ago, which kind of prompts the question of how dumb they really are if they were wise to this well in advance of him, but we’ll let that slide. Ed tries to heed the wise words of his friend, but a mere few sentences later, his weak nerve breaks and he realizes that he doesn’t have to outrun the social justice mob, he only has to outrun Patton Oswalt, so he slaps a PRIVILEGE RULES, SOCIAL JUSTICE DROOLS sign on Oswalt’s back and takes off at a sprint.

Salon is indeed a worthless leftish tabloid, so good on Oswalt for giving ’em the what-for. And the rest of Ed’s post is perfectly agreeable, so huzzah to him for saying it. Overall, there’s far more positives than negatives in those two links. But like Ben Franklin said, you fellows might want to learn how to hang together, or you will assuredly hang separately. Look, I speak as one who has spent a few years waging solo guerilla warfare deep behind enemy lines here. I returned with a very simple message: If there is ever to be a viable alternative to technocratic, corporate-friendly, neoliberal Democrats or rabid, corporate-friendly, reactionary Republicans, it sure as shit is not going to spring from the barren, toxic soil of intersectional identity politics. Therefore, there is no need to placate these people or make excuses for them. If you are critical of them at all and significant enough to attract their attention, they will eventually treat you the same way they’ve treated all those other racist, misogynist, right-wing shitlords, many of whom, funny enough, considered themselves liberals in good standing right up until the moment they found themselves being publicly denounced and ostracized. If you think this only happens to people who “deserve” it, that your obvious reasonableness and unimpeachable credibility will prevent such a travesty from ever happening to you, then you’re a fool, and I hope for your sake you’re not active on social media.

The Huffington Post picked up on this and reported that the pizza place “publicly vow(ed)” to “reject gay weddings.” This entirely inaccurate description of what actually transpired was seized upon by countless folks all around the Interwebs. The pizza shop’s Yelp page was spammed with eight pages negative reviews, most of them quite obviously from people who had never been there. Their phone rang off the hook with fake orders. Someone on Twitter threatened to burn the shop down. The folks at Memories Pizza temporarily closed their restaurant.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.